The Syrian civil war is a worse disaster than the Haitian earthquake or the Indian Ocean tsunami.

More than 4 million Syrians are refugees outside their country and many more are homeless and displaced within the country.

But fewer than one-tenth of the Syrian refugees have sought asylum in Europe, and, according to Pew Research, four out of five of the asylum-seekers are not Syrian.

The International Convention on Refugees requires countries to accept anyone who flees their own country out of a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group.

National governments put applicants through a vetting process to determine whether they truly are refugees. I think it is reasonable to think that many of the applicants are just typical poor immigrants in search of a better life. I don’t condemn anybody from migrating in search of a better life, but this is not the same thing as being a refugee.

I think it would be a nice gesture for European countries to take in Syrian refugees. I think the countries that should take in the most refugees are the countries that did the most to create the refugee problem.

Aside from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, these countries are the USA, the UK and France, which have bombed Syria and backed radical terrorist rebels against the government.

But this would be a gesture only. The only real solution to the Syrian refugee problem is peace in Syria, followed by rebuilding, so that they can return to their own country.

The European refugee crisis is due mainly to the Islamic State’s reign of terror in parts of Syria.

Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless dictator who will do whatever it takes to stay in power. But his regime doesn’t mutilate and kill people because of their religion or lifestyle. People of different religions and ethnicities have co-existed peacefully under his government.

This is not true of the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh). Under their rule, you are not safe unless you are willing to live under their extreme and wrong ideas of what Islam was like in the days of Mohammad.

Since the surge of millions of refugees into Europe directly affects U.S. allies, and since ISIS is the direct cause of this crisis, why does the United States hesitate to join forces with the Iranian government, which is the main enemy of ISIS?

Gareth Porter, writing for Middle East Eye, has a good idea of the reasons:

US policy toward the Middle East has long been defined primarily not by threats originating in the region but by much more potent domestic political interests, both electoral and bureaucratic.

The power of the Israel lobby in Washington, primarily but not exclusively over Congress, is well known, and that has imposed a rigid political and legal framework of hostility toward Iran on the US government for two decades, beginning with a complete trade embargo that remains in place and creates major obstacles to any shift in policy.

What is seldom acknowledged, however, is that the interests of the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA have become tightly intertwined with those of the anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East.

A set of mutually reinforcing bureaucratic interests now binds US policy to an alliance structure and military and intelligence programmes in the Middle East that have come to replace objective analysis of regional realities in determining US policy.